Books by Karen Cook
https://www.routledge.com/Music-Theory-in-Late-Medieval-Avignon-Magister-Johannes-Pipardi/Cook/p/book/9780367691288, 2021
Now out from Routledge! See flyer for discount code.
Publications by Karen Cook
Underscore: The A-R Editions Blog, 2022
The Jigsaw, blog for the American Musicological Society Music History Pedagogy Study Group, 2022
The Museum of Renaissance Music: A History in 100 Exhibits, 2022
forthcoming
under review at Out of the Cloister: Lone Medievalists Making the Middle Ages Matter, a themed is... more under review at Out of the Cloister: Lone Medievalists Making the Middle Ages Matter, a themed issue of The Lone Medievalist, forthcoming 2021.
Journal of Sound and Music in Games, 2021
Translation of “Ludomusicología: Normalizando el Estudio de la Música de los Videojuegos.” Juan... more Translation of “Ludomusicología: Normalizando el Estudio de la Música de los Videojuegos.” Juan Pablo Fernández-Cortés, originally published in Anuario Musical 75 (Jan–Dec 2020): 181–199.
Teaching the Game: A Collection of Syllabi for Game Design, Development, and Implementation, vols. 1–2, 2021
Co-authored syllabus for an Introduction to Video Game Music undergraduate seminar.
EMAg: The Magazine of Early Music America, 2020
The Medieval Disability Sourcebook, 2020
https://punctumbooks.com/titles/medieval-disability-sourcebook/
Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching (SMART), 2020
The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism, 2020
Journal of Sound and Music in Games, 2020
Music in the Role-Playing Game: Heroes & Harmonies, 2019
EMAg: The Magazine of Early Music America, 2018
Studies in Medievalism XXVII: Authenticity, Medievalism, Music, 2018
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Books by Karen Cook
Publications by Karen Cook
Jean was many things: a Bishop, a Cardinal, a Vicar-General, a doctor in utroque iure, a mediator. He was also a patron of musicians, counting amongst his familiars Richardus de Bozonville and Johannes de Bosco. The former was the owner/possible copyist of Apt 16bis, the latter a composer in sources like Apt and Bologna Q15; both were singers in Clement VII’s chapel. Heretofore unknown is that Jean had yet another musical familiar: Johannes Pipardi, whom I have identified as the theorist Johannes Pipudi.
Pipardi was part of Jean’s household by 1375, possibly remaining so until Jean’s death. He was a canon at the church of Saint-Didier, where Jean was later buried, and was also the magister behind the treatise De arte cantus in Seville 5.2.25. In previous work, I suggested that De arte cantus is one of the earliest known sources for the Libellus cantus mensurabilis, purportedly by Johannes de Muris, via its similarities to the Berkeley Manuscript. In locating Pipardi in the same immediate circles as de Bozonville and de Bosco, I shed new light on an important musical patron, on an environment that nurtured late fourteenth-century musical development, and on the potential connections between Pipardi’s theories and the notated record.
This archetypal conception of the bard is turned on its head in “The Bard’s Tale” (2004), an action-based RPG. Here, the Bard acts purely in his own self-interest, a boorish, sarcastic antihero. He sings no one’s praises; he narrates nothing; he improves no one’s morale; and his tunes, rather than attacking his foes directly, instead summon a variety of creatures to do his dirty work for him. In this respect, music is central to the formation of the Bard’s RPG “party.” Unusual for the genre, though, the game has no real soundtrack aside from the Bard’s tunes. I argue in this paper that the typical traits of both the bard and the RPG are thus subverted, at the heart of which subversion lies music.
Since his early years as half of the duo Wham!, Michael had been frustratingly stereotyped as a superficial teen idol. He deliberately cultivated a more serious yet rebellious image on his multiplatinum debut album Faith (1987). The famous video for the title track showed Michael in now-iconic attire: ripped jeans, black boots, leather jacket and sunglasses reminiscent of James Dean. While listeners recognized the album’s maturity, they also saw his sexualized image as commercially motivated. Michael was again pigeonholed as a sex symbol, and in part due to the album’s sexual lyrics and racy videos, questions abounded as to his orientation.
With Listen, Michael deliberately set himself apart from his prior endeavors. In opposition to the synthesizer-heavy Faith, Listen was largely acoustic, darker in timbre and tone, and its introspective, confessional lyrics replaced sex with heartbreak and longing. Michael himself appears neither on the album cover nor in most promotional material, and in the video for “Freedom ‘90,” a vehement rejection of his previous persona, the iconic attire from the “Faith” video is set ablaze.
The lyrical, visual, and musical choices made on Listen demonstrate Michael’s conscious remodeling of his image. His uneasiness with his industry-constructed persona climaxes in its blatant visual and verbal destruction. His contemplative, confessional approach duplicates this remediation, re-casting him yet again as a serious musician but also as a lonely, isolated man trying to be “someone [he] forgot to be.” Moreover, points of lyrical continuity between Faith and Listen speak to Michael’s changing understanding of his homosexuality, which he would not publicly acknowledge for another eight years. Listen is thus a major turning point in Michael’s alignment of his public and private identities and a marker of his quest to belong to himself alone.